Current location in this text. Enter a Perseus citation to go to another section or work. Full search
options are on the right side and top of the page.

ATHENAEUS is the author of this book; and in it he is
discoursing with Timocrates: and the name of the book is
the Deipnosophists. In this work Laurentius is introduced, a
Roman, a man of distinguished fortune, giving a banquet in
his own house to men of the highest eminence for every kind
of learning and accomplishment; and there is no sort of
gentlemanly knowledge which he does not mention in the
conversation which he attributes to them; for he has put
down in his book, fish, and their uses, and the meaning of
their names; and he has described divers kinds of vegetables,
and animals of all sorts. He has introduced also men who
have written histories, and poets, and, in short, clever men of
all sorts; and he discusses musical instruments, and quotes
ten thousand jokes: he talks of the different kinds of drinking
cups, and of the riches of kings, and the size of ships, and
numbers of other things which I cannot easily enumerate,
and the day would fail me if I endeavoured to go through
them separately.

And the arrangement of the conversation is an imitation
of a sumptuous banquet; and the plan of the book follows
the arrangement of the conversation. This, then, is the
delicious feast of words which this admirable master of the
[p. 2]
feast, Athenæus, has prepared for us; and gradually sur-
passing himself, like the orator at Athens, as he warms with
his subject, he bounds on towards the end of the book in
noble strides.

Athenaeus. The Deipnosophists. Or Banquet Of The Learned Of Athenaeus. London. Henry G. Bohn, York Street, Covent Garden. 1854.

The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.

An XML version of this text is available for download,
with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted
changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.